Selecting an area of interest

There are three ways to select an area of interest:

1. Box Tool

   Select the box icon located in the upper left-hand corner of the map. Use this to select your potential study site area.

   

2. Bounding Box Coordinates

   You may also manually enter the coordinates of your bounding box. The map will update based on these bounding box coordinates.

   

3. Shapefile

   You can upload a shapefile covering your area of interest. Please ensure shapefiles are in GeoJSON format. The shapefile will be displayed once uploaded. A good tool for creating a shapefile for your area of interest in https://geojson.io/.

   

Selecting raster data

Once you have selected an area of interest, you will need to add raster data related to your selection criteria.

1. Default Raster Data

   Use the drop down menu to select a type of raster data. There are three default raster sources: ESA WorldCover, SRTM Elevation, and Human Footprint data. Once you have selected a source press Add Raster. The raster will be displayed on the map when finished.

   

2. Upload your own data

   Select Upload a file from the drop down menu. Press Browse and navigate to the raster on your computer. Uploaded rasters must be in GeoTiff format. If your area encompasses multiple tiles, please merge before uploading. If you are using a categorical raster, make sure there is a color table associated with it for correct display. If you are using the browser version, please ensure you are using Google Chrome, as it is the only browser that supports GeoTiffs. (Note: the browser version only accepts uploads less than 5 MB, while the local version can accept uploads up to 100 MB).

   

   You can continue adding rasters to cover all of your parameters of interests. Please use the map toggle betweeen visualizing the different data sources.

   

Generated Sites

You must select a sampling procedure in order to generate a list of sites. You may also skip this step by leaving sampling procedure as None and only using selected sites (see instructions below).

1. Random Sites

   Sites will be selected based on simple random sampling. Only land areas will be selected, and bodies of water will be avoided. You must specify the number of sites needed and the distance between the sites. You can also specify that sites must be a certain distance from a major city and/or major roads.

2. Village Sites

   Village sites will find all of the towns/villages/cities in the selected area using OpenStreetMap. You can have the tool find all of the villages in an area or randomly select a subset from that region. Note that if you select a very large area for village sites, the request may time out.

Selected Sites

These are your “shortlist” sites that you are considering for the study. If you don’t have any selected sites yet, you can leave this option as None. Otherwise, there are two options for adding selected sites:

1. Select on Map

   Select this option to toggle a tool that allows you to click on the map to add sites to the selected list. Clicked areas will show up as red points. If you need to clear the points, please select the option below the map.

2. Upload a CSV

   Select this option to upload a list of sites in CSV format. The CSV should contain a column labeled site, which has the site name, and columns with latitude and longitude in decimal degrees.